World Cup Witch Doctor Imposes Curse on Star Player

Christiano Ronaldo enjoys the highest salary of any soccer player on the planet. But his millions, and the Western medicine that accompanies it, prove no match for the sorcery of a Ghanaian witch doctor.

“I know what Cristiano Ronaldo’s injury is about, I’m working on him,” Nana Kwaku Bonsam tells a Kumasi, Ghana radio station. “I am very serious about it. Last week, I went around looking for four dogs and I got them to be used in manufacturing a special spirit called Kahwiri Kapam.”

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Ronaldo sat out a match against Greece this weekend. But the injury report listed a knee, not Kahwiri Kapam, as the reason.

The New York Times reported last year that Bonsom, then visiting the Big Apple, regularly goes into spiritual battles with Pentecostal ministers back in Ghana.

On April 2, 2008, Mr. Kwaku Bonsam stormed into the church of Collins Agyei Yeboah, a popular Pentecostal pastor in Kato, another southern town. Accompanied by a crew of policemen and reporters, he accused Pastor Yeboah of secretly soliciting the help of his traditional gods and then failing to properly compensate him and the gods for their services. Mr. Kwaku Bonsam claimed the gods had given him two choices: to retrieve the idol he had given the pastor, or to die at 6 p.m. that day…. In YouTube videos of the episode, viewed hundreds of thousands of times, Mr. Kwaku Bonsam went on to say that 1,600 pastors from around the country had visited him requesting juju spirits to help build their churches. The idol is eventually retrieved from behind Pastor Yeboah’s church and after a lengthy interrogation, the pastor is led away by the police. In the video, he angrily defended himself by saying that he had indeed consulted Mr. Kwaku Bonsam, but that the powers he had given him didn’t work.

Ronaldo surely would dispute the indictment of the potency of Bonsam’s magic. Bonsam styles himself as a sort of Babe Ruth of witch doctors, having called his shot on the soccer player. “I said it four months ago that I will work on Cristiano Ronaldo seriously and rule him out of the World up or at least prevent him from playing against Ghana and the best thing I can do is to keep him out though injury,” said the evil warlock, whose name appropriately means “Devil of Wednesday.” Ghana meets Portugal in the opening round of the World Cup in Brasilia on June 26.

Ronaldo will not be ready by then, promises the witch doctor. “This injury can never be cured by any medic, they can never see what is causing the injury because it is spiritual,” he divulges. “Today, it is his knee, tomorrow it is his thigh, next day it is something else.”